Reflections, Reviews and News from the worlds of Opera and Classical Music

Thursday, 6 March 2014

A Fairy-Tale Search for Humanity: Die Frau ohne Schatten

Here's another departure from standard blog style, but I thought it might be worth republishing another piece about Die Frau ohne Schatten ahead of its return to the Royal Opera next week (there are still plenty of tickets, made all the more enticing by several special offers). In this case, this is a more general introduction to the work, albeit one that addresses its problems and complexities. It was originally written for the programme for the Mariinsky performances of the opera at the Edinburgh International Festival in September 2011 (in Jonathan Kent's production, recently released on DVD and Blu-ray on the Mariinsky's own label). I'm grateful for permission to reproduce it here.

Die Frau ohne Schatten
sits squarely and imposingly at the centre of Strauss’s career as an opera
composer. It is the seventh of his 15 operas and the third fully collaborative one
of the five that Strauss composed to librettos by the Viennese poet and
dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The period from the first mention by
Hofmannsthal of the new project (late in 1910), through its completion in 1917,
to the eventual premiere at the Vienna Opera two years later, covers the central
decade of Strauss’s composing life. It also, of course, encompassed the years
of a conflict that changed the world for ever.

Die Frau ohne Schatten
was conceived in the golden twilight of what the Viennese writer Stefan
Zweig (later also a librettist of Strauss’s) called a ‘Golden Age of Security’,
consciously positioned as the summation of a great tradition whose foundations
were left irreparably shaken by World War I. Work on the opera, moreover, had
left both men drained. Strauss, during the final stages of composition,
declared ‘let’s make up our minds that Die
Frau ohne Schatten shall be the last Romantic opera’. Hofmannsthal
continued to develop the subject as the Erzählung,
a prose novella, finally completed in 1919; but he promised his composer that
subsequent collaborations would be ‘in a light genre, not gigantic burdens on
your shoulders, such as Die Frau ohne
Schatten must have been’.

The opera’s gestation had been a story of delays, imposed
both from without and within. And Hofmannsthal, from the start, had anticipated
that the ‘joint chief work’ would take time. ‘With a beautiful subject such as Die Frau ohne Schatten’, he wrote to
Strauss in May 1911, ‘so able to become the vehicle of beautiful poetry and
beautiful music … it would be a crime if one wanted to hurry, wanted to force
oneself.’ And take his time Hofmannsthal did: the first scene of Act I was
finally sent to Strauss as a ‘little New Year’s gift’ on 28 December 1913, a
full three years after the first mention of the new project; it was not until
nearly two years later that the composer had Act III to hand.

For the librettist, Die
Frau ohne Schatten set out to realize Goethe’s own operatic ideal, emulate
the humanist message of Mozart’s Die
Zauberflöte and present a shimmering kaleidoscope of literary allusion,
from East and West. The forbidding spectre of Wagner, too, hovered
Keikobad-like over the whole enterprise: Strauss’s vast score used a rich
tapestry of Wagnerian leitmotif; Hofmannsthal’s libretto echoed many episodes
in the old master’s music dramas.

As a fairy-tale concentrating on the search for humanity, it
was also a project particularly close to the librettist’s heart. The precocious
young Hofmannsthal, whose essays and poetry had made him the toast of literary
Vienna while he was still a teenager in the early 1890s, had finally renounced
a life of aesthetic and intellectual isolation, most famously in his ‘Letter to
Lord Chandos’ (1902). Die Frau can be
understood to reflect his own search for humanity, and broader social
relevance, in his work.

All this ambition seemed justified, however, by the success
of the first two Strauss–Hofmannsthal operas. Elektra (1908) had been based on Hofmannsthal’s existing adaptation
of Sophocles, originally written for the producer Max Reinhardt in 1903; but Der Rosenkavalier (1911)was fully collaborative, completed on
schedule and, in spite of the inevitable niggles and quibbles, as smoothly as
could be expected. Among a multitude of ideas for potential successors to that
work, those for Ariadne auf Naxos and
Die Frau ohne Schatten began to take
shape at about the same time, in 1910, initially sharing several elements
(notably the idea of incorporating the commedia
dell’arte pair of Harlekin and Smeraldine, who became central to Ariadne but also leave traces in the
‘lowly’ couple Barak and his wife in Die
Frau).

Hofmannsthal developed a straightforward strategy: Die Frau ohne Schatten would be left to
stew on the back burner; Ariadne auf
Naxos would be composed as an interim theatrical experiment, a modest
thank-you for Reinhardt, who had helped Der
Rosenkavalier on to the stage. It would also help Hofmannsthal hone his
skills as a librettist in readiness forthe
larger project. The first version of Ariadne
auf Naxos was, indeed, completed in 1912, but Hofmannsthal was still not
ready to put pen to paper on the next opera. A trip to Italy was planned in the
spring of 1913—a rare extended meeting between Strauss and Hofmannsthal—in
which librettist and composer further developed ideas for the new work.
Hofmannsthal’s progress remained slow, however: no impatient nagging from his
composer could speed him up, so he satisfied Strauss’s need for steady industry
with other assignments.

One diversion came in Josephslegende
(1914), composed for Diaghilev’s BalletsRusses, the scenario of which, by Hofmannsthal and Count Harry Kessler, was
suffused with the sort of obscure religious mysticism that hardly chimed with
Strauss’s own personal philosophy. Furthermore, the unsuccessful premiere in
October 1912 of the first version of Ariadne
auf Naxos—a chamber-scale theatrical hybrid that pitted Hofmannsthal’s
reworking of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme
against a new neo-classical opera—led to it being laboriously reworked into the
form we know today, and eventually completed in 1916. Strauss also dusted off
his own Eine Alpensinfonie, whose
sketches went back to the start of the century, completing it 1915 while
waiting for the libretto for the final act of Die Frau ohne Schatten.

More than just robbing Strauss of the compositional momentum
on which he thived, however, these last two projects in particular are unlikely
to have helped focus the composer’s mind. In reworking Ariadne, Strauss composed a new extended prologue full of humour
and quick-fire conversational exchanges. This was an operatic idiom he was
itching to explore further (he finally got the chance in Intermezzo (1923), composed to his own libretto), but one, as he
admitted to his librettist, that had no place in Die Frau. Behind Eine
Alpensinfonie’snarrative of a
day’s mountaineering, meanwhile, bubbled Strauss’s own philosophy of pragmatic
self-determination. He had planned to call the tone-poem Der Antichrist, after Nietzsche, and the sketches reveal that the
final movement was at one stage to have expressed an ethos of ‘Befreiung durch die Arbeit: das künstlerische Schaffen’
(‘liberation through work: artistic
creation’).

This attitude apparently makes its way into Die Frau ohne Schatten as Barak launches
into the final quartet with a paean to hard work: ‘Nun will ich jubeln … nun
will ich schaffen’ (‘Now I celebrate … now I create’). But it was an attitude
out of sympathy with the Empress’s apparently all-too-easy salvation through
renunciation. Indeed, Strauss’s identification with Barak—bluff, generously
melodic and hardworking—was immediate, and it is possible to detect a mixture
of envy and condescension in the way Hofmannsthal paints the character. Barak’s
sturdy, bourgeois work ethic is built on a straightforward desire to provide
for his hotly anticipated family; when in Act II ‘higher powers’ (‘Übermächte’,
the Nurse calls them) begin to exert their influence, his concern hardly
extends beyond the fact that it is too dark to work and his favourite mortar is
mysteriously broken.

Such an interpretation gains corroboration through
Hofmannsthal’s clear intention, expressed in his first notes for the opera from
February 1911, that there be ‘at the centre a bizarre figure like Strauss’s
wife’. He wrote to Strauss a couple of weeks later that ‘for one of the women
your wife might well, in all discretion, be taken as a model—that, of course,
is wholly entre nous, and not of any
great importance. Anyway, she is a bizarre
woman with a very good soul, au fond:
unfathomable, moody, domineering and yet at the same time likeable’.

Discretion was not always Strauss’s strong suit, though, and
it did not take long for him to blurt out this parallel to his wife, Pauline,
reassuring her that ‘regarding your portrait you need not have any fears’. The
composer clearly knew what made her tick, though, and a letter to Karl Böhm in
1943 encouraged the conductor to ensure great care be taken with the scene in
Act I in which the Wife is seduced by jewels and fawning servant girls: it is a
scene, wrote Strauss, that ‘my wife always particularly looks forward to’.

Audiences, too, have found it easier to identify with the
human couple and struggle somewhat, as Strauss did, to sympathize with the
shadowless Empress and her archetypal husband. Hofmannsthal was alert to this
danger and outlined the importance of the Empress as follows: ‘She has not a
great deal to say and yet is actually the most important figure in the opera.
You should never forget that. It is all about becoming human; she—not the other
one—is the woman without a shadow’. Her husband, meanwhile, was deliberately
cast, to borrow the Nurse’s words, as ‘hunter, lover, and nothing more’.

Strauss abandoned an early idea — voiced on the Italy trip,
as Hofmannsthal recalled, ‘in the moonlight between San Michele and Bozen’—of
using the small ‘Ariadne’ orchestra alone to accompany the action in the spirit
world. He nevertheless uses an exquisitely refined palette to accompany the
beautiful, fairy-like Empress’s appearance in Act I. She floats gracefully into
a world of crystalline textures and brittle musical ideas (her motifs are
largely built round empty intervals of 2nds, 4ths and 5ths, avoiding the
all-important third degree of the scale). Her vocal line is unassertive, often
simply shadowing the instruments of the orchestra. The musical characterization
of the Emperor is no less skilful. As the unthinking husband, he is a
deliberately unsympathetic creation. Franz Werfel branded him a rapist, and
there is a constant, uncomfortable elision of his two roles, as hunter and
lover, that is ingeniously captured in Strauss’s score. Macho horn-calls mix
with conventionally amorous cantilena, while his strenuous cadences each assert
one of two significant keys: E flat, the traditional key of the hunt, and E,
the key of Don Juan, associated for
ever in Strauss’s oeuvre with erotic pursuits.

The imperial couple’s scenes in Act II, described by Hofmannsthal
as ‘lyrical effusions … points of repose between the constantly progressing
action on earth’, tested Strauss’s compositional technique yet further. The
Emperor’s plangent moonlight serenade, his uncomprehending questions to the
implacable Falcon and his desperate attempts to exact retribution on his wife
for communing with humanity: they all culminate in a thunderous reiteration of
his fate, represented by the ‘Er wird zu Stein’ (‘He turns to stone’) motif
first drummed into us in the Spirit Messenger’s early confrontation with the
Nurse.

Strauss was surely right, too, to express a certain modest
pride in the achievement of the Empress’s remarkable bedroom scene. For long
stretches the verbal scaffolding is removed; Strauss’s music is left to stand
alone, expressing the Empress’s growing sense of sympathy with Barak,
illustrating her vision, articulating her horror at the prospect of her
husband’s fate, and anticipating, with the introduction of the trombone’s
powerful calls to judgment, the pivotal temple scene in Act III. In that scene,
by neat contrast, music cedes its power to words as the Empress resorts to her
speaking voice—a decision, Strauss suggested later, that was possibly a result
of ‘a certain nervous irritation in the score’ resulting from ‘wartime
worries’.

Throughout the compositional process, Strauss sought
explanations for Hofmannsthal’s complicated symbols, yet the composer’s main
difficulty came after the Empress’s renunciation of the shadow in Act III.
Hofmannsthal later called this an ‘allomatic’ solution—using an obscure word to
imply change effected through mutual interaction with society. But such a
solution was anathema to Strauss’s own ethos of self-determination. It also,
arguably, came dangerously close to the Wagnerian doctrine of renunciation that
the composer had spent much of his early career uncoupling from its associated
musical apparatus—most famously in the tone-poems of the 1890s, including, of
course, Also Sprach Zarathustra,
based ‘freely on Nietzsche’.

But there was difficulty on a more basic level, too. In his
first typescript for the final act, Hofmannsthal marked in pencil against the
final chorus for the Unborn Children the following: ‘quasi epilogue (like that
tender “end after the end” in Der
Rosenkavalier)’. At the end of Die
Frau’s long, truncated period of composition, Strauss delivered accordingly,
but admitted major difficulty with the final scene, particularly in comparison
with Der Rosenkavalier and its
celebrated trio.

‘Characters like the Emperor and Empress, and also the
Nurse, cannot be filled with red corpuscles in the same way as a Marschallin, an
Octavian or an Ochs’, he complained to his librettist. ‘I have now sketched out
the whole end of the opera (the quartet and the choruses) and it has got verve
and a great upward sweep—but my wife finds it cold and misses the
heart-touching flame-kindling melodic texture of the Rosenkavalier trio’. That trio received its melancholy colour from
the Marschallin’s own very human renunciation of her younger lover, a situation
which, Hofmannsthal noted early on, had strong parallels with that of Hans
Sachs in Wagner’s DieMeistersinger von Nürnberg.

In the characters of Die
Frau ohne Schatten, however, Hofmannsthal sought to express a wider truth: ‘there
[in Der Rosenkavalier] the situation
is a sentimental one,’ he explained, ‘here it is heroic and spiritual, akin to
the atmosphere of Fidelio or Die Zauberflöte.’ Accordingly Strauss’s
finale starts to transcend the dramatic concerns of individual characters to
touch on something more universal about humanity, art and the nature of social
interaction. The grand final ensemble therefore becomes less operatic than
symphonic; the narrative surrenders to the classic darkness-to-lighttrajectory so favoured by Romantic
composers. Indeed, several commentators have drawn parallels between the
upward-striving spirituality of Hofmannsthal and Strauss’s finalewith that of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony,
with its setting of the final verses of Goethe’s Faust, Part II.

If the celebratory voices of the final quartet come together
more anonymously than those of the Rosenkavalier
trio, though, Strauss still keeps a symphonic twist up his sleeve. The ‘Er
wird zu Stein’ motif, which has haunted the whole score as a reminder of the
Emperor’s fate, is reintroduced as the quartet begins to run out of steam. But
now it does not drag us into a disorientating, distant minor key; rather, it
leads into a dizzying series of modulations, an extended cadence into bright C
major and a final outburst for full orchestra, which, piled with motifs and
dissonances, seems to struggle under its own celebratory weight.

The sound of the Emperor’s Falcon, represented throughout
the opera by a threateningly dissonant cry in the high woodwind, is a distant
memory. The ‘trial’ motif, a stern call to judgment introduced by the trombones
in the Empress’s bedroom scene, is now docile, gently underpinning the
celebratory message of the final chorus for the Unborn Children. Musically,
everything is bathed—not inappropriately—in a sort of post-coital glow.

For all the visceral appeal of Strauss’s score, though,
charges regarding the obscurity of Hofmannsthal’s libretto have stuck. Yet it
was Hofmannsthal’s sense of ambition that drove Strauss to produce what he
believed to be his most remarkable work. Throughout his life Strauss maintained
his faith in the transcendent importance of great art, and he seems in
particular to have felt that Die Frau
ohne Schatten expressed this within its broader human message. ‘May your
first performance of Die Frau ohne
Schatten mark a new glorious blossoming of the opera house for the healing
of German art’, he wrote hopefully in 1920 to a colleague about to stage the
work in Berlin. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that Die Frau ohne Schatten’s beauties and complexities have seen itbecome an ever more regular sight on
the stage in our own difficult, ambiguous times, when the bond between art and
humanity is as important as ever.

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About Me

I am freelance critic, writer and musicologist based in Berlin. I have held editorial posts at Gramophone and Opera, was opera critic of the Spectator and have worked as a critic for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. I was editor of 30-Second Opera (Ivy Press, 2015), now also available – when I checked last – in French, German and Spanish. My PhD (awarded from King's College London in early 2011) was a critical reassessment of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'; further details of my academic work can be found under 'Publications and Papers'.
If you'd like to email me, I can be reached on hugojeshirley[at]gmail.com.

About this Blog

Fatal Conclusions is designed to serve as a modest outlet for various reviews (of varying levels of formality and punctuality) and ideas regarding what's going on in the Opera and Classical Music worlds--and, if I'm feeling adventurous, beyond. Thanks for popping by. I hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to leave comments.